Chef's Table (2015) s01e06 Episode Script
Magnus Nilsson
As a creative person, you're always influenced by the experiences you have.
And if one of them is that you're constantly relating to other similar restaurants, that's inevitably going to affect what you do.
If you look at the whole restaurant world and you look at a certain bigger city, there is a feeling to many of the restaurants that tie them together.
At Fäviken, we don't have to relate to anything that we don't want.
'Cause it's just us here.
Just this little universe.
It's kind of limitless, you know? To start a fine dining restaurant isn't easy.
To start a fine dining restaurant in the middle of nowhere, it's impossible.
What Magnus has created is special.
It's flat, it's trees, it's water and it's on the way to nowhere.
It is, therefore extreme.
And in extremity, you discover something new in food.
Fäviken is built on things that would never work for any other restaurant.
Depending on where you live in the world, you're flying up to Trondheim, Norway, and then you're renting a car, and you've gotta check your GPS, and you have to drive through little Norwegian fjords, and then you find this fairy tale world of this giant, sprawling Swedish hunting lodge and farm with nothing else happening, except this 12-seat restaurant.
There's a sense that you've stumbled on this ancient Nordic hideaway.
A version of that, that's been translated through Magnus' imagination and obsessions, and passions.
And so before you eat a bite of food, you've gone along for this romantic ride.
The biggest part of Magnus is he got put in the middle of nowhere.
And in the middle of nowhere, you cook food more or less like it was always done.
Counting and plating in one and a half minutes.
Mikey, you can spread.
Start plating.
So he is discovering all these things that people did for the previous 150,000 years as though it's new and it's now.
Nobody else is doing it.
When I was at Fäviken the first time, it was magic.
It was really the intensity of the taste that struck me.
You feel that every single element, every tiny, little piece of meat, of fish, of leaf, it's necessary.
He's sort of stripped away all the trappings of the classical, Michelin-starred, fancy cuisine.
He's doing things exactly his way and no other way.
But at the heart of everything that he makes is this quest to make delicious food.
You guys ready for us? Looks very nice.
Running a restaurant at that level, in a place where six months a year there is nothing growing, that is one of the most incredible challenge that a chef can have.
Are you getting the peas out? Are you getting them out, Jesper? We're ready to plate now, and there are no peas in place.
Shake it, shake it.
Yeah.
Come on, Mikey.
Anyone can learn to duplicate a technique, but that's not creative expression.
What's interesting is true development.
It's not something that happens over, like, a couple of weeks or a year.
But to me, it gives the base for true creativity.
I didn't work with beef before.
'Cause most of the time, beef isn't very interesting.
It's just proteins pumped up, with very little flavor.
Fifty years ago, it was, like, one kind of cow.
And because of the way we farm in the Western world, the whole development has split all of these old dual-purpose breeds into two lines.
One that produces just milk, so there is a cow which stands there for, perhaps, eight or ten years, consuming vast amounts of grain just to produce milk.
On the other hand, you have beef cattle, which do nothing.
They just stand there, also eating vast amounts of grain to grow as quickly as possible so that they reach a really big size.
And they're fed into becoming these sort of living monsters of meat.
It's enormously ineffective.
I think that that was kind of what triggered the idea of using the dairy cow in the restaurant.
Because it just seems stupid to do the way it's done now.
The first dairy cow that we bought, it had a depth of flavor and things that I didn't find in ordinary beef.
And that was when it started to turn really interesting.
The dairy cow that has mostly eaten grass during its life from a nice farm where they are allowed to pasture, you will have much more flavor, you will have much more texture, and you will also have much more natural marbling.
It's very exciting when you kind of hit that moment where you realize that you're onto something, when you realize that there is knowledge that's just lying there in the open, it's just that no one is using it.
Mikey? Yes? - Pick up.
- Yep.
To create true understanding of produce and technique, it's a long process.
And most chefs don't even think about that as the chef's job.
And that's not very constructive, it's actually very lazy.
I think for any restaurant like this, it's very important to not just accept things the way they are, but to actually Like, the things that you are intrigued by or interested in, that you actually go and investigate.
Like, "What's there?" and, like, "Why?" And if it doesn't make sense, how can it transform to become greater? - Yep.
- Will you clean this up a little bit? - Yeah, yeah, for sure.
- Thank you.
Gladly.
Mia, for the mushroom sauce Yeah? We can have a little bit more of this birch syrup in it, and maybe a little bit more salt.
- Just a little bit.
- Yeah.
I notice everything that happens in the kitchen.
I notice every little single details because I was there to develop them.
Overall, pretty good.
It wasn't one of those fantastic evenings.
It was just a very ordinary evening.
But, like, good.
Um this, I don't like.
No one asked me if it was fine to do carrot flakes there.
Uh, I don't know, Jesper, if you okayed it, but I think it's an absolutely crazy decision because it's like, how can you come up with the idea to exchange the flavor of cured saltiness with fresh carrots? Like, why don't we take a piece of pickled carrot then? Unlike other creative professions, cooking at a very high level in a restaurant, it means that you get no second chances.
Okay, first tray, prioritized.
I've got some crab coming.
I can't go to my customer and say that, you know, like, "Crab wasn't very good today, but, you know, sorry about that.
You'll have to come back here to have that crab again.
" Okay, be ready to pick up.
Very nice looking, the crab today.
A little bit too much cream on the two last plates, on the third tray.
Yeah.
I mean, everything has to be perfect.
As long as you do your job properly, it's not too bad.
- I think half of it then.
- Yeah? - And then continue cooking the rest.
- Yeah.
The way the kitchen is kind of structured at Fäviken, it's a little bit backwards.
In many big restaurants, there is a bunch of trainees doing all kinds of leaf picking, and then the mise en place gets filtered up through layers of people.
Finally it ends up on the pass where people like me stand and plate.
So there is no accountability for the lower end of the hierarchy.
Very nice looking, the cream.
Have you started cutting? - Start cutting.
Mikey! - Yes.
Come on.
Fantastic cooking, people.
And then here, we've done it the other way around.
So we'll have one person announcing everything and controlling the service, then we'll have, on the pass with him, we'll have the trainees, the people that are the least experienced.
And we'll have the most experienced cooks in the back, actually cooking.
It's much better to have no filters until they arrive on the pass, and then having everyone actually doing their things perfectly from the beginning instead.
Now? Looks very wet, eh? I will uh fix it.
Have you vacked? Like never vac meat.
We talked about that earlier, haven't we? Peter? Do you have one that's un-vacked? No.
It should be there, you know, on the grid.
Right? Yes.
It's fun to see these pictures.
Time passes so fast! Sure does.
These are a perfect snapshot of that time.
We're eating the "julbord" buffet.
The classic 1980's Swedish Christmas feast.
Yes.
I never thought I was gonna live here when I'd grown up.
I like No.
I shouldn't say that I liked living here growing up, because I didn't.
Uh I tolerated living here.
Like most kids in Jämtland, I grew up close to nature.
Being outside, hunting, fishing, surrounded by fantastic natural beauty.
When you're exposed to it every day, you get blind to that after a while.
I never thought it was going to be possible to actually live life here and work with the profession that I had chosen, a very, very high-end, very ambitious cooking.
'Cause there were no such restaurants here.
I did what, I think, many other young, ambitious chefs do.
I moved out of my parents' house and went to cooking school.
We sat here, and Magnus came to ask if he could go to cooking school in à re.
We told him, "There's a perfectly good cooking school right here!" Then he said, "But this school is the best one.
And that is that!" So So this is our hall of fame, we call it.
It's students that's done something special.
Here's Magnus.
Magnus.
The first day he came here, he was so small and tiny, and, you know, a little bit shy.
And he was just waiting to climb out of himself.
He was an inventor.
He wanted to try out spices.
Sweet when it was supposed to have salt and sour when it was supposed to be sugar instead.
There was no limit at all.
And we just, "Oh, well, Magnus, wait, wait a bit.
Are you sure about that?" "Oh, let's try it.
" "Okay.
" When he was given boring, traditional recipes, you can't change them because the recipe says like this.
He didn't like that at all because he was It was choking him and you could see it, it was choking him.
The people who went to school with him, they say, like, "Oh, Magnus, I wouldn't I would never have thought that he should go all the way to make a place like Fäviken.
How come he succeed on the other side of the mountain? What is he doing so well that we don't do? What does he know that we don't know?" The thing is, they read cookbooks.
But Magnus, he doesn't read cookbooks.
He create.
New is not always better, as with almost anything.
But what's interesting with food culture, and also a little bit scary, is that the second you stop practicing, it tends to die out really quickly.
After one generation, you will have no one left who knows how to do something with their hand.
And after three generations, the only thing that's left is the photos or something like that.
And you can't go back and understand how someone did something 1,000 years ago with food like you can with sculpture or painting or whatever it might be.
You can actually look at a marble block carved in ancient Greece, and you can see how it was done.
But there aren't any cured hams from ancient Greece that are still there to show us how that was done.
It makes food culture very special, because it is also the most important cultural manifestation that we have, 'cause we all have to eat.
For most people, I think that Nordic food is, it's like gravlax and herrings, and open-faced sandwiches and stuff like that, which it is.
But that's a tiny, tiny, tiny, little part.
A lot of the things that are passed, they are becoming extinct or getting forgotten.
My job is to keep the original alive in a way that people can actually understand.
I was asked by my publisher if I couldn't do a documentation on Nordic food, from a home perspective.
What people actually eat in their homes and why, and where it comes from.
It's a region that spans from Finland in the east to Greenland in the west, and there's so much diversity and so many different things.
I started doing research for the book.
So I traveled around in the Nordic region to interview people and to search for recipes, and to find and document cultural occurrences within the realm of food.
There are so many things that I found during these trips that I didn't know existed, that has in some way influenced what we do now in the restaurant.
There's one dish that we do, which is a little quail's egg rolled in ash.
And that comes from something that I found on Iceland.
In the spring, they will take wild ducks' eggs and they will put them in boxes, which they fill with ash.
The ashes, they get from cleaning out the bottom of the traditional smoke houses, which are fueled with sheep's shit, dried sheep's shit.
And this sort of alkaline ash, it cures the egg a bit.
Like a 1,000-year-old egg would have been done in Asia somewhere.
And it was just so fascinating.
They still maintained these traditions.
So I went there, I found it, I ate it, and documented it for the book.
And two years later, ended up on the menu.
Not at all as the dish in Iceland, but I can clearly see the link to that particular moment when I found that.
The only way for traditions in food to be kept alive is to let them adapt.
Because, if you keep them in museum, they will eventually die out.
Uh, we have 14 tonight, and 12 is staying for breakfast.
It's two companies of four and three companies of two.
No allergies today.
Okay? The, uh, menu tonight.
It's a new dish, and we call it Välling.
We're going to do as many of these new dishes as we feel where we can.
But if we can't do them, we're going to do the old dishes, because we have prep for them.
Look at Mike, he has, like, prepped for 15 services.
I sometimes get the question if our cooking is seasonal.
And I think that is really intriguing, because what's seasonal here in February? Nothing, you know, nothing grows here.
But we have a lot of vegetables on the menu still.
And they're not fresh.
They're from last autumn, and they've been stored in some way, and that adds layers of complexity to the dishes.
To choose to be hyper-seasonal, and hyper-local, and just use what's there, when you're covered with snow and you're in pitch blackness, is a kind of crazy, Magnus-style suicide mission for a chef.
I got an introduction to the world of preserving foods, because some of the techniques were used when I grew up.
If you want to have potatoes in March, well, then you better harvest some potatoes in August and put them in your root cellar.
That's just how you do it.
In a way, it's about kind of defeating the seasons.
Then I saw that many of these old techniques for preserving food really worked well for the restaurant, because it produced a different style, a completely different kind of something in the food.
So we started just researching more and more about these particular techniques.
Curing meats, for example, like charcuterie.
Picking root vegetables and storing them in your root cellar.
Brining cucumbers, or harvesting game meat in the autumn and freezing it for the winter.
It's kind of a no-brainer.
It's like, "All right, so I'm trained to cook.
All these things that people did are actually really effective.
I can take my old ingredients and make them into a modern meal.
" The result is a food that's vital and wonderful, and that he's then got the chops to do stuff with.
What's interesting is to interpret and to work with techniques that aren't used commonly in restaurants, and to gradually improve dishes into as close to perfection that you can ever come.
- Tacy, where are you? - Yeah.
There are plates to be cleaned here.
There.
The one Hewin is plating right now.
- Your hands nice and clean, Mia? - Yes.
That looks about right, right? When I started cooking school, the dream was to have, you know, the greatest restaurant on the planet.
How to achieve that was something that I thought a lot about.
Mikey.
After cooking school, I went somewhere where I thought it was going to be so much better.
And in my case, that was Paris.
You go to France to be trained, and there's a tradition of it, and it's brutal, and it's brilliant.
It presupposes a knowledge of your ingredients and what to do with them that nobody else has.
It doesn't mean that you're gonna be creative, it doesn't mean you're gonna know That you're gonna come up with new recipes.
It doesn't mean you're gonna be a success, but you have the tools.
And you can't get 'em anywhere else.
When I went to France, the fact that I didn't speak French, it naturally led to difficulties finding a job.
I handed out resumes to every restaurant in Paris almost, like to All of the three stars, and all of the two stars, and many of the one stars also, and few of them even called back.
That was very, very difficult.
Pretty close to where we lived, there was this little place that had one star then, called L'Astrance.
It was kind of a last call before giving up and going home to Sweden.
I went in there, and I met the chef, Pascal.
I introduced myself, I handed him my CV, and I asked if he had a job for me.
And he didn't have a job, basically.
But he didn't say specifically that, "No, you cannot be here.
" He just didn't say "Yes.
" That was a mistake by him in the sense that I went back there the day after also, and almost every morning for a couple of weeks.
I guess he grew tired of me disrupting his morning cigarettes.
So he invited me into the kitchen and I stayed there for a few years.
The most important thing that I learned from L'Astrance was the dish will never be better than the produce.
The difference between good and fantastic, you would be surprised how many chefs don't see that difference.
Are you guys ready for us? Yes.
I choose the tasting menu format because I think that is the foremost expression of food.
The running of the kitchen, it's not the difficult part, because that's just about structure and planning.
Difficult part is to be able to see when you're crossing the line with the eater, and also to be able to see when you need to push the eater.
How many courses is an average tasting menu? Maybe, I don't know, 20, something like that, perhaps.
That's a lot of time.
That's like a full work-day of eating.
And for us, the first six or seven little bites, they come in a very rapid succession, one every 180 seconds.
So basically, when you had a little bite, the next one just arrives.
Then after a few delicious bites, it's a little bit slower.
A new plated course landing on your table every seven or eight minutes.
After the half hour, a little bit of wine, the pace will change again, and we just increase it very rapid.
Then after that you can go back to plated courses again.
You're gonna sit down for two-and-a-half hours in my restaurant, I'm going to give you 30 courses.
When you control it perfectly, no one thinks about it being too quick.
It's just delicious.
I'd like this to be done a little better from now on, Jesper.
You can't leave a mess on your baking sheet.
Or anything else.
Because it's you who's doing the most work and setting the example.
It's hard to tell the others to improve if you don't set a good example.
Just take that peel outside.
We're gonna take this one early.
I decided to leave L'Astrance after three, three-and-a-half years.
And I had this project in the Champagne region, which was set up by Pascal.
And we were discussing opening a restaurant.
Um, but then the financial crisis hit, and that project was put on ice.
So I got a job in Stockholm instead.
It was very unenjoyable, because the great produce wasn't there, you know.
More importantly, when I tried to do my stuff, many of the things that I made were so strongly colored by my time at L'Astrance.
So it didn't feel like they were mine.
Just felt like less well executed copies of someone else's stuff.
As a creative person, to feel like you're cooking someone else's food, is not particularly nice.
It turned me off from cooking completely.
We're all here for a certain amount of time, and we're going to have to do something.
And to me, I always thought that it seems really stupid to do things if they're not good.
I usually make my big life decisions spontaneously.
There is no sitting down and writing lists of pros and cons, and all that stuff.
It's just that Oh, you know, no.
I didn't have to cook, therefore, I stopped cooking.
I was just done.
A friend of mine worked at Fäviken and he knew that I didn't have a job.
And he asked me if I didn't want to come up and help them sort out the wine cellar, as a little consultancy.
I had no intention at all to ever get back into a kitchen.
And I basically, I took the job up here, because me and Tove were expecting our first child, so I needed to do something.
I tricked myself into believing that it was just going to be a short consultancy, and that I was not going to work in the restaurant.
Then it turned out that I got along really well with the owners, and they asked me if I didn't wanna stay for another year and help the restaurant to become something.
The reason I got back into the kitchen was basically because I'd made a promise to kind of get things going.
There were no one else to do it.
In any creative craft, what's produced is a reflection of the person doing it.
And everything that that person has experienced, and what makes that person up.
Seven.
We may need an Ah! No, no, you should not You should not Never use a template.
- Like, um - Oh.
So it's more like this? It almost looks somewhere in between, maybe, like eye shaped.
Mine is like an angry Egyptian Sphinx eye.
Yeah, that's what we thought.
We thought it looked, yeah, too Egyptian.
- Yeah.
- On the plate.
Like rounded, yeah.
But they don't have to be the same, Mia.
They're sort of the same.
In Jämtland, we have access to all these fantastic products.
All of this unspoiled nature and wildlife, and all the great produce and all that stuff.
And when I grew up, I never appreciated them for that because it was just part of everyday life.
I used to think that the best products came from France.
Actually, this is closer to where high quality scallops grow than most other great restaurants of the world.
You keeping a consistent quality on those scallops? The scallops that just came in are really nice and big.
Is the, uh, juniper done? When we had the best scallops at L'Astrance, it came from 200 kilometers from here.
They smell good.
It smells when you come in, like, when you open the door to the kitchen.
The idea with the dish is that you'll have this scallop, which is better than anyone else's scallop.
We've just cooked it, we haven't added anything.
We haven't even added salt, there's nothing in it.
It's just perfect product cooked in a very simple way, over a burning fire of juniper branches.
The look of that dish, it is also a representation of this area.
It looks like a piece of the forest floor is picked up and placed on the plate.
We cooked thousands of scallops, and that's still on the menu today.
It's a perfect representation of the restaurant and this place.
The first big review that we got was in Dagens Industri, which is a, sort of, the business daily of Sweden, the national business daily.
And they gave us 25 out of 25.
Hey, picking up.
Mike, you have second tray? Second tray.
Yeah, next is the trout, guys.
And that led to much more people coming into the restaurant.
Cooking felt more intriguing because it was actually fun again.
My background is in this, kind of, very ambitious restaurant.
But it is also here.
It is kind of a magical circle he's completed.
Not just by realizing that there's all these local ingredients that he can work with, but he's come home.
He's become Magnus, the Viking.
I understood some way, wherever in the world he was, that he would come back here, because he is very much Jämtland.
This whole part of the world, the Scandinavian inland, has a particular feeling to it, because not that many people live here.
There's a lot of forests, and a lot of little lakes, and mysterious hidden places.
Feels almost like a children's fantasy book.
He completely reversed the game.
Instead of saying, "I want to open a restaurant in New York," he created the best restaurant in the middle of nowhere, where everybody will come.
I think it's really nice that I got the opportunity to run the restaurant like this, in a place like this, in a region where I didn't think that I liked back then, but realized that I've always liked now.
And I don't think that a lot of people get to do that, because most of the time you have to move yourself to somewhere where the opportunity is presented.
And, in my case, I had to move back you know, to where the opportunity was presented, which is different.
It's still exactly the same place.
It's just that I see it differently.
And if one of them is that you're constantly relating to other similar restaurants, that's inevitably going to affect what you do.
If you look at the whole restaurant world and you look at a certain bigger city, there is a feeling to many of the restaurants that tie them together.
At Fäviken, we don't have to relate to anything that we don't want.
'Cause it's just us here.
Just this little universe.
It's kind of limitless, you know? To start a fine dining restaurant isn't easy.
To start a fine dining restaurant in the middle of nowhere, it's impossible.
What Magnus has created is special.
It's flat, it's trees, it's water and it's on the way to nowhere.
It is, therefore extreme.
And in extremity, you discover something new in food.
Fäviken is built on things that would never work for any other restaurant.
Depending on where you live in the world, you're flying up to Trondheim, Norway, and then you're renting a car, and you've gotta check your GPS, and you have to drive through little Norwegian fjords, and then you find this fairy tale world of this giant, sprawling Swedish hunting lodge and farm with nothing else happening, except this 12-seat restaurant.
There's a sense that you've stumbled on this ancient Nordic hideaway.
A version of that, that's been translated through Magnus' imagination and obsessions, and passions.
And so before you eat a bite of food, you've gone along for this romantic ride.
The biggest part of Magnus is he got put in the middle of nowhere.
And in the middle of nowhere, you cook food more or less like it was always done.
Counting and plating in one and a half minutes.
Mikey, you can spread.
Start plating.
So he is discovering all these things that people did for the previous 150,000 years as though it's new and it's now.
Nobody else is doing it.
When I was at Fäviken the first time, it was magic.
It was really the intensity of the taste that struck me.
You feel that every single element, every tiny, little piece of meat, of fish, of leaf, it's necessary.
He's sort of stripped away all the trappings of the classical, Michelin-starred, fancy cuisine.
He's doing things exactly his way and no other way.
But at the heart of everything that he makes is this quest to make delicious food.
You guys ready for us? Looks very nice.
Running a restaurant at that level, in a place where six months a year there is nothing growing, that is one of the most incredible challenge that a chef can have.
Are you getting the peas out? Are you getting them out, Jesper? We're ready to plate now, and there are no peas in place.
Shake it, shake it.
Yeah.
Come on, Mikey.
Anyone can learn to duplicate a technique, but that's not creative expression.
What's interesting is true development.
It's not something that happens over, like, a couple of weeks or a year.
But to me, it gives the base for true creativity.
I didn't work with beef before.
'Cause most of the time, beef isn't very interesting.
It's just proteins pumped up, with very little flavor.
Fifty years ago, it was, like, one kind of cow.
And because of the way we farm in the Western world, the whole development has split all of these old dual-purpose breeds into two lines.
One that produces just milk, so there is a cow which stands there for, perhaps, eight or ten years, consuming vast amounts of grain just to produce milk.
On the other hand, you have beef cattle, which do nothing.
They just stand there, also eating vast amounts of grain to grow as quickly as possible so that they reach a really big size.
And they're fed into becoming these sort of living monsters of meat.
It's enormously ineffective.
I think that that was kind of what triggered the idea of using the dairy cow in the restaurant.
Because it just seems stupid to do the way it's done now.
The first dairy cow that we bought, it had a depth of flavor and things that I didn't find in ordinary beef.
And that was when it started to turn really interesting.
The dairy cow that has mostly eaten grass during its life from a nice farm where they are allowed to pasture, you will have much more flavor, you will have much more texture, and you will also have much more natural marbling.
It's very exciting when you kind of hit that moment where you realize that you're onto something, when you realize that there is knowledge that's just lying there in the open, it's just that no one is using it.
Mikey? Yes? - Pick up.
- Yep.
To create true understanding of produce and technique, it's a long process.
And most chefs don't even think about that as the chef's job.
And that's not very constructive, it's actually very lazy.
I think for any restaurant like this, it's very important to not just accept things the way they are, but to actually Like, the things that you are intrigued by or interested in, that you actually go and investigate.
Like, "What's there?" and, like, "Why?" And if it doesn't make sense, how can it transform to become greater? - Yep.
- Will you clean this up a little bit? - Yeah, yeah, for sure.
- Thank you.
Gladly.
Mia, for the mushroom sauce Yeah? We can have a little bit more of this birch syrup in it, and maybe a little bit more salt.
- Just a little bit.
- Yeah.
I notice everything that happens in the kitchen.
I notice every little single details because I was there to develop them.
Overall, pretty good.
It wasn't one of those fantastic evenings.
It was just a very ordinary evening.
But, like, good.
Um this, I don't like.
No one asked me if it was fine to do carrot flakes there.
Uh, I don't know, Jesper, if you okayed it, but I think it's an absolutely crazy decision because it's like, how can you come up with the idea to exchange the flavor of cured saltiness with fresh carrots? Like, why don't we take a piece of pickled carrot then? Unlike other creative professions, cooking at a very high level in a restaurant, it means that you get no second chances.
Okay, first tray, prioritized.
I've got some crab coming.
I can't go to my customer and say that, you know, like, "Crab wasn't very good today, but, you know, sorry about that.
You'll have to come back here to have that crab again.
" Okay, be ready to pick up.
Very nice looking, the crab today.
A little bit too much cream on the two last plates, on the third tray.
Yeah.
I mean, everything has to be perfect.
As long as you do your job properly, it's not too bad.
- I think half of it then.
- Yeah? - And then continue cooking the rest.
- Yeah.
The way the kitchen is kind of structured at Fäviken, it's a little bit backwards.
In many big restaurants, there is a bunch of trainees doing all kinds of leaf picking, and then the mise en place gets filtered up through layers of people.
Finally it ends up on the pass where people like me stand and plate.
So there is no accountability for the lower end of the hierarchy.
Very nice looking, the cream.
Have you started cutting? - Start cutting.
Mikey! - Yes.
Come on.
Fantastic cooking, people.
And then here, we've done it the other way around.
So we'll have one person announcing everything and controlling the service, then we'll have, on the pass with him, we'll have the trainees, the people that are the least experienced.
And we'll have the most experienced cooks in the back, actually cooking.
It's much better to have no filters until they arrive on the pass, and then having everyone actually doing their things perfectly from the beginning instead.
Now? Looks very wet, eh? I will uh fix it.
Have you vacked? Like never vac meat.
We talked about that earlier, haven't we? Peter? Do you have one that's un-vacked? No.
It should be there, you know, on the grid.
Right? Yes.
It's fun to see these pictures.
Time passes so fast! Sure does.
These are a perfect snapshot of that time.
We're eating the "julbord" buffet.
The classic 1980's Swedish Christmas feast.
Yes.
I never thought I was gonna live here when I'd grown up.
I like No.
I shouldn't say that I liked living here growing up, because I didn't.
Uh I tolerated living here.
Like most kids in Jämtland, I grew up close to nature.
Being outside, hunting, fishing, surrounded by fantastic natural beauty.
When you're exposed to it every day, you get blind to that after a while.
I never thought it was going to be possible to actually live life here and work with the profession that I had chosen, a very, very high-end, very ambitious cooking.
'Cause there were no such restaurants here.
I did what, I think, many other young, ambitious chefs do.
I moved out of my parents' house and went to cooking school.
We sat here, and Magnus came to ask if he could go to cooking school in à re.
We told him, "There's a perfectly good cooking school right here!" Then he said, "But this school is the best one.
And that is that!" So So this is our hall of fame, we call it.
It's students that's done something special.
Here's Magnus.
Magnus.
The first day he came here, he was so small and tiny, and, you know, a little bit shy.
And he was just waiting to climb out of himself.
He was an inventor.
He wanted to try out spices.
Sweet when it was supposed to have salt and sour when it was supposed to be sugar instead.
There was no limit at all.
And we just, "Oh, well, Magnus, wait, wait a bit.
Are you sure about that?" "Oh, let's try it.
" "Okay.
" When he was given boring, traditional recipes, you can't change them because the recipe says like this.
He didn't like that at all because he was It was choking him and you could see it, it was choking him.
The people who went to school with him, they say, like, "Oh, Magnus, I wouldn't I would never have thought that he should go all the way to make a place like Fäviken.
How come he succeed on the other side of the mountain? What is he doing so well that we don't do? What does he know that we don't know?" The thing is, they read cookbooks.
But Magnus, he doesn't read cookbooks.
He create.
New is not always better, as with almost anything.
But what's interesting with food culture, and also a little bit scary, is that the second you stop practicing, it tends to die out really quickly.
After one generation, you will have no one left who knows how to do something with their hand.
And after three generations, the only thing that's left is the photos or something like that.
And you can't go back and understand how someone did something 1,000 years ago with food like you can with sculpture or painting or whatever it might be.
You can actually look at a marble block carved in ancient Greece, and you can see how it was done.
But there aren't any cured hams from ancient Greece that are still there to show us how that was done.
It makes food culture very special, because it is also the most important cultural manifestation that we have, 'cause we all have to eat.
For most people, I think that Nordic food is, it's like gravlax and herrings, and open-faced sandwiches and stuff like that, which it is.
But that's a tiny, tiny, tiny, little part.
A lot of the things that are passed, they are becoming extinct or getting forgotten.
My job is to keep the original alive in a way that people can actually understand.
I was asked by my publisher if I couldn't do a documentation on Nordic food, from a home perspective.
What people actually eat in their homes and why, and where it comes from.
It's a region that spans from Finland in the east to Greenland in the west, and there's so much diversity and so many different things.
I started doing research for the book.
So I traveled around in the Nordic region to interview people and to search for recipes, and to find and document cultural occurrences within the realm of food.
There are so many things that I found during these trips that I didn't know existed, that has in some way influenced what we do now in the restaurant.
There's one dish that we do, which is a little quail's egg rolled in ash.
And that comes from something that I found on Iceland.
In the spring, they will take wild ducks' eggs and they will put them in boxes, which they fill with ash.
The ashes, they get from cleaning out the bottom of the traditional smoke houses, which are fueled with sheep's shit, dried sheep's shit.
And this sort of alkaline ash, it cures the egg a bit.
Like a 1,000-year-old egg would have been done in Asia somewhere.
And it was just so fascinating.
They still maintained these traditions.
So I went there, I found it, I ate it, and documented it for the book.
And two years later, ended up on the menu.
Not at all as the dish in Iceland, but I can clearly see the link to that particular moment when I found that.
The only way for traditions in food to be kept alive is to let them adapt.
Because, if you keep them in museum, they will eventually die out.
Uh, we have 14 tonight, and 12 is staying for breakfast.
It's two companies of four and three companies of two.
No allergies today.
Okay? The, uh, menu tonight.
It's a new dish, and we call it Välling.
We're going to do as many of these new dishes as we feel where we can.
But if we can't do them, we're going to do the old dishes, because we have prep for them.
Look at Mike, he has, like, prepped for 15 services.
I sometimes get the question if our cooking is seasonal.
And I think that is really intriguing, because what's seasonal here in February? Nothing, you know, nothing grows here.
But we have a lot of vegetables on the menu still.
And they're not fresh.
They're from last autumn, and they've been stored in some way, and that adds layers of complexity to the dishes.
To choose to be hyper-seasonal, and hyper-local, and just use what's there, when you're covered with snow and you're in pitch blackness, is a kind of crazy, Magnus-style suicide mission for a chef.
I got an introduction to the world of preserving foods, because some of the techniques were used when I grew up.
If you want to have potatoes in March, well, then you better harvest some potatoes in August and put them in your root cellar.
That's just how you do it.
In a way, it's about kind of defeating the seasons.
Then I saw that many of these old techniques for preserving food really worked well for the restaurant, because it produced a different style, a completely different kind of something in the food.
So we started just researching more and more about these particular techniques.
Curing meats, for example, like charcuterie.
Picking root vegetables and storing them in your root cellar.
Brining cucumbers, or harvesting game meat in the autumn and freezing it for the winter.
It's kind of a no-brainer.
It's like, "All right, so I'm trained to cook.
All these things that people did are actually really effective.
I can take my old ingredients and make them into a modern meal.
" The result is a food that's vital and wonderful, and that he's then got the chops to do stuff with.
What's interesting is to interpret and to work with techniques that aren't used commonly in restaurants, and to gradually improve dishes into as close to perfection that you can ever come.
- Tacy, where are you? - Yeah.
There are plates to be cleaned here.
There.
The one Hewin is plating right now.
- Your hands nice and clean, Mia? - Yes.
That looks about right, right? When I started cooking school, the dream was to have, you know, the greatest restaurant on the planet.
How to achieve that was something that I thought a lot about.
Mikey.
After cooking school, I went somewhere where I thought it was going to be so much better.
And in my case, that was Paris.
You go to France to be trained, and there's a tradition of it, and it's brutal, and it's brilliant.
It presupposes a knowledge of your ingredients and what to do with them that nobody else has.
It doesn't mean that you're gonna be creative, it doesn't mean you're gonna know That you're gonna come up with new recipes.
It doesn't mean you're gonna be a success, but you have the tools.
And you can't get 'em anywhere else.
When I went to France, the fact that I didn't speak French, it naturally led to difficulties finding a job.
I handed out resumes to every restaurant in Paris almost, like to All of the three stars, and all of the two stars, and many of the one stars also, and few of them even called back.
That was very, very difficult.
Pretty close to where we lived, there was this little place that had one star then, called L'Astrance.
It was kind of a last call before giving up and going home to Sweden.
I went in there, and I met the chef, Pascal.
I introduced myself, I handed him my CV, and I asked if he had a job for me.
And he didn't have a job, basically.
But he didn't say specifically that, "No, you cannot be here.
" He just didn't say "Yes.
" That was a mistake by him in the sense that I went back there the day after also, and almost every morning for a couple of weeks.
I guess he grew tired of me disrupting his morning cigarettes.
So he invited me into the kitchen and I stayed there for a few years.
The most important thing that I learned from L'Astrance was the dish will never be better than the produce.
The difference between good and fantastic, you would be surprised how many chefs don't see that difference.
Are you guys ready for us? Yes.
I choose the tasting menu format because I think that is the foremost expression of food.
The running of the kitchen, it's not the difficult part, because that's just about structure and planning.
Difficult part is to be able to see when you're crossing the line with the eater, and also to be able to see when you need to push the eater.
How many courses is an average tasting menu? Maybe, I don't know, 20, something like that, perhaps.
That's a lot of time.
That's like a full work-day of eating.
And for us, the first six or seven little bites, they come in a very rapid succession, one every 180 seconds.
So basically, when you had a little bite, the next one just arrives.
Then after a few delicious bites, it's a little bit slower.
A new plated course landing on your table every seven or eight minutes.
After the half hour, a little bit of wine, the pace will change again, and we just increase it very rapid.
Then after that you can go back to plated courses again.
You're gonna sit down for two-and-a-half hours in my restaurant, I'm going to give you 30 courses.
When you control it perfectly, no one thinks about it being too quick.
It's just delicious.
I'd like this to be done a little better from now on, Jesper.
You can't leave a mess on your baking sheet.
Or anything else.
Because it's you who's doing the most work and setting the example.
It's hard to tell the others to improve if you don't set a good example.
Just take that peel outside.
We're gonna take this one early.
I decided to leave L'Astrance after three, three-and-a-half years.
And I had this project in the Champagne region, which was set up by Pascal.
And we were discussing opening a restaurant.
Um, but then the financial crisis hit, and that project was put on ice.
So I got a job in Stockholm instead.
It was very unenjoyable, because the great produce wasn't there, you know.
More importantly, when I tried to do my stuff, many of the things that I made were so strongly colored by my time at L'Astrance.
So it didn't feel like they were mine.
Just felt like less well executed copies of someone else's stuff.
As a creative person, to feel like you're cooking someone else's food, is not particularly nice.
It turned me off from cooking completely.
We're all here for a certain amount of time, and we're going to have to do something.
And to me, I always thought that it seems really stupid to do things if they're not good.
I usually make my big life decisions spontaneously.
There is no sitting down and writing lists of pros and cons, and all that stuff.
It's just that Oh, you know, no.
I didn't have to cook, therefore, I stopped cooking.
I was just done.
A friend of mine worked at Fäviken and he knew that I didn't have a job.
And he asked me if I didn't want to come up and help them sort out the wine cellar, as a little consultancy.
I had no intention at all to ever get back into a kitchen.
And I basically, I took the job up here, because me and Tove were expecting our first child, so I needed to do something.
I tricked myself into believing that it was just going to be a short consultancy, and that I was not going to work in the restaurant.
Then it turned out that I got along really well with the owners, and they asked me if I didn't wanna stay for another year and help the restaurant to become something.
The reason I got back into the kitchen was basically because I'd made a promise to kind of get things going.
There were no one else to do it.
In any creative craft, what's produced is a reflection of the person doing it.
And everything that that person has experienced, and what makes that person up.
Seven.
We may need an Ah! No, no, you should not You should not Never use a template.
- Like, um - Oh.
So it's more like this? It almost looks somewhere in between, maybe, like eye shaped.
Mine is like an angry Egyptian Sphinx eye.
Yeah, that's what we thought.
We thought it looked, yeah, too Egyptian.
- Yeah.
- On the plate.
Like rounded, yeah.
But they don't have to be the same, Mia.
They're sort of the same.
In Jämtland, we have access to all these fantastic products.
All of this unspoiled nature and wildlife, and all the great produce and all that stuff.
And when I grew up, I never appreciated them for that because it was just part of everyday life.
I used to think that the best products came from France.
Actually, this is closer to where high quality scallops grow than most other great restaurants of the world.
You keeping a consistent quality on those scallops? The scallops that just came in are really nice and big.
Is the, uh, juniper done? When we had the best scallops at L'Astrance, it came from 200 kilometers from here.
They smell good.
It smells when you come in, like, when you open the door to the kitchen.
The idea with the dish is that you'll have this scallop, which is better than anyone else's scallop.
We've just cooked it, we haven't added anything.
We haven't even added salt, there's nothing in it.
It's just perfect product cooked in a very simple way, over a burning fire of juniper branches.
The look of that dish, it is also a representation of this area.
It looks like a piece of the forest floor is picked up and placed on the plate.
We cooked thousands of scallops, and that's still on the menu today.
It's a perfect representation of the restaurant and this place.
The first big review that we got was in Dagens Industri, which is a, sort of, the business daily of Sweden, the national business daily.
And they gave us 25 out of 25.
Hey, picking up.
Mike, you have second tray? Second tray.
Yeah, next is the trout, guys.
And that led to much more people coming into the restaurant.
Cooking felt more intriguing because it was actually fun again.
My background is in this, kind of, very ambitious restaurant.
But it is also here.
It is kind of a magical circle he's completed.
Not just by realizing that there's all these local ingredients that he can work with, but he's come home.
He's become Magnus, the Viking.
I understood some way, wherever in the world he was, that he would come back here, because he is very much Jämtland.
This whole part of the world, the Scandinavian inland, has a particular feeling to it, because not that many people live here.
There's a lot of forests, and a lot of little lakes, and mysterious hidden places.
Feels almost like a children's fantasy book.
He completely reversed the game.
Instead of saying, "I want to open a restaurant in New York," he created the best restaurant in the middle of nowhere, where everybody will come.
I think it's really nice that I got the opportunity to run the restaurant like this, in a place like this, in a region where I didn't think that I liked back then, but realized that I've always liked now.
And I don't think that a lot of people get to do that, because most of the time you have to move yourself to somewhere where the opportunity is presented.
And, in my case, I had to move back you know, to where the opportunity was presented, which is different.
It's still exactly the same place.
It's just that I see it differently.